Just a few weeks back, while reviewing The Hunger Games, Your Humble Correspondent swore up and down that I detest gore and always give slasher movies a wide berth. Well, I guess that we all have to eat our words sometimes. Not only did I go see The Cabin in the Woods on opening day, but I actually had tremendous fun watching it, and recommend that you give it a try even if you think that you don’t like this sort of thing at all.

To explain why, I’m going to have to issue a mild spoiler alert herewith. The advertising campaign for Cabin in the Woods is necessarily extremely misleading, because nearly anything that one can say about the plot beyond “Five youths go to spend a weekend at a remote, spooky house and then all Hell breaks loose” will be interpreted by some viewers as giving away too much. Of course, that description sounds like every one of a couple of hundred lame adolescent torture-porn flicks of the past several decades. So why would you or I want to see it?